East Anglia TWO lays 1.8 km of cable ducts under the seabed

Two drilling rigs, one on land and one at sea, worked at the same time on the Suffolk coast to bore beneath the shoreline. Their product is a pair of plastic pipes, each 1.8 km long and 800 mm in diameter, which will later carry high-voltage cables from the 960 MW East Anglia TWO windfarm to land. ScottishPower Renewables, the company building the windfarm, has completed the work and calls it a “global engineering first”.

The method is horizontal directional drilling, or HDD: the rig bores deep underground along a planned path, so the duct never has to be laid in a trench across the beach. The company says this avoids digging up beaches and coastlines and “minimising any disruption to the environment and sensitive landscapes”. Ross Ovens, the company's managing director for offshore, describes landfall works as “one of the most technically challenging aspects of building an offshore windfarm”, and this drilling is three times the length of the company's other East Anglia HDD projects.

The scale pushed the supply chain as well. Pipelife Norway says its 1,793 m pipe is the longest it has ever made, produced by continuous extrusion as one uninterrupted length. Its project manager Martin Myhre says that avoids welded joints, which he describes as making the solution “more robust and reliable”. The contractor is OCU Group, with support from subsidiary Peter McCormack & Sons, and the company says the work is breaking UK and world records, a claim it makes itself.

For the windfarm, the ducts are the route its export cables will use, and power can reach land only once those cables are installed. ScottishPower Renewables expects the first cables in summer 2027 and commercial operation from late 2028. The contract supports more than 80 jobs during construction. The project sits 33 km offshore from Southwold and 37 km from Lowestoft.

The dates are the company's own expectations, not fixed commitments, and the milestone so far produces no electricity. What it does show is that the landfall stage, which the company describes as one of the most demanding in offshore wind, has been completed on this project.